Sunday, 25 June 2006

A case of serendipity - I came across a copy of the May edition of In the Black, CPA Australia's magazine for accountants, that just happened to have a feature on Web 2.0; or as they put it "Make money out of the internet this time around".

It was interesting to read an accountants perspective on Web 2.0 - I even picked up a new concept, "inventory bubble". Basically what this means is that the some of the success of auction sites like eBay is effectively based on traders buying from other traders rather than actually selling something to the final consumer. The net result I suppose is a bit like a pyramid scheme?

However, despite this warning overall there is a suggestion - and thinking here about the classic Gartner S-shaped hype curve - that the this time around the basis of the Web 2.0 business models (or at least those people investing in them) are a lot more mature than we saw in 2000. There is also a point made that many of the viable or successful Internet business models have nothing to do with Web 2.0. So, the bottom line is just good common sense: forget the hype, is the fundamental business model sound?